The present invention is directed generally to electronic systems of slave devices, and more particularly, to a staggered charging of slave devices in an electronic system such as detonators in an electronic blasting system.
Prior art electronic detonators have used automatic charging of the firing capacitors upon connection to the system bus, but this kind of uncontrolled charging presents safety concerns. Alternately, electronic blasting systems have employed simultaneous charging of all the detonators in the system upon an arming command, but charging so many firing capacitors at once may result in an excessive voltage drop across the bus, causing unregulated voltage or even resetting the detonator.